Adwords and bad keywords

Confused!

[tjubb]

I have a website that focuses on Nascar star Jeff Gordon. However keywords as simple as "jeff gordon" or "nascar" or "hendrick motorsports" end up being at risk despite having decent CTR's. Not sure why "jeff gordon" would slow my whole ad group down since that is the main topic and does get clicks and impressions.

Please help! Thanks!

Tom

[submitx]

On "jeff gordon" I see more than one advertiser, so you are getting smaller piece of the pie. On the other keywords, you might want to change your title and description to see if it makes a difference.

Another possibilty is that maybe you are selling something and the person typing the keyword is really looking for information or vise versa.

You may have no choice but to keep creating new ad groups every so often once your ads get disabled. I do this for many of my own keywords. Also, you might want to click on your own ads once in a while to keep the click thru high. It will take your ad spending higher, but if you are paying low rates then it's just something to consider.

[skibum]

Buy the broad, phrase and exact match of the keyword and see if that makes a difference. See what phrases that include a keyword people search for and buy them separately. If you buy general keywords like "Jeff Gordon" and get traffic, looks at your logs or tracking system and see what people are actually searching for who click on those ads and buy more specific keywords.

[justshelley]

Consider taking a very close look at what your website offers and start using the heck out of negative terms to weed out un-wanted traffic.

If someone is looking specifically for Jeff Gordon socks, posters, books, drivers, biography, die-cast, card, log, stats, etc. and you don't have that item or information on your site, then you've wasted money on that click through.

Then use EDIT KEYWORDS ¦ ESTIMATE TRAFFIC ¦ FIND ALTERNATIVES to look at the terms in your campaign that perform well to see if you can find more relevant terms or even get hints for more negative terms.

[tjubb]

Thanks for everyone's input! I'll adjust my ads accordingly and hopefully things go well. It's just strange how one day I get 200 clicks and other days I get 10.

Thanks!

Tom

[Clark]

It's really crazy. 8% ctr on a keyword that couldn't be more on target, disabled. I can understand if they feel they are making more money with other advertisers if they want to show a particular ad less, but disabling keywords with high ctr with no rhyme or reason or explanation is costing them advertisers. I want to put my ad on and leave it there forever. If during the christmas season 50 guys are outbidding me and you don't show my keyword for that time, great. But disabling it means that after christmas, those guys are gone and my ad is gone too. I want to spend my time working on my sites, not on keeping google keyword spreadsheets in order to give google money to advertise.

If a technical person finds it confusing, you can bet the average person does. I know some people w/ big budgets who tried Google Adwords and gave up. They're in my industry and can put a lot of cash into the system. As an adsense publisher, I find this sad.

And also, the algo seems to change too. I can understand algo changes for the SERPS to keep SEOs guessing. But advertisers?